No love lost in Travolta's violent trip to 'Paris'
From Paris with what?
Sure, when most people think of Paris and the movies, they think of the City of Love. But "From Paris With Love" is anything but.
The Paris in this hyperactive movie, from director Pierre Morel and producer-writer Luc Besson, is more like the City of Carnage and Nonstop Ultra-Violence. It's a city teeming with Chinese coke dealers and Pakistani terrorists, gunfights in the streets, and rocket-launcher battles on the freeways.
John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers star as CIA agents on a bloody rampage through Paris, which becomes a testing ground and training day for would-be agent James Reece (Meyers), a chess-playing aide to the U.S. Ambassador (Richard Durden).
Paris also becomes a murderous arena for Travolta's Charlie Wax, the character that gives this movie most of its entertainment value and displays the actor's gift for playing psychopaths to the max.
Charlie is a muscular, if somewhat overweight, CIA troubleshooter in commando garb. He has a black goatee, a chrome-dome bald pate, the acid gab of a mean radio talk show host, a flair for firing Uzis with both hands and an insatiable appetite for drugs, hookers and bloodshed.
He's no Charles Boyer.
And Morel's "From Paris With Love" is no romantic comedy, either, although it strives for comic payoffs from time to time.
The main romance in "Paris" isn't one you'd expect between model-slim wannabe hero James and his lithe, giggly French girlfriend, Caroline (Kasia Smutniak, a fetching ex-model).
The movie's prime flirtation takes place between James and Charlie, who gives his younger buddy a baptism in massacre and a bloody coming-of-age lesson.
Soon, poor James is fully engaged as Charlie's go-fer chauffeur, forced to carry around a huge vase full of cocaine for what seems like half the movie.
Meanwhile, Charlie John-Woos the bad guys at a local Chinese restaurant and drug den as James watches bodies drop down a spiral staircase and bounce on the steps.
Considering Charlie averages about a kill an hour on his brief Parisian stay, this seems like a really dangerous liaison for James.
Charlie Wax is a compelling, amusingly loony character. He shares something in common with another violent Travolta-created character - Vincent Vega the hit man in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" - an appreciation for the French "royale with cheese."
Morel does know how to make a movie move.
"From Paris With Love" flies by in a windstorm of quick-slick street shots and rat-a-tat cutting.
Morel's last movie, the exciting but ridiculous "Taken," also presented Paris as if it were a mix of Dodge City, Beirut and Chicago during the Capone era. And "From Paris With Love" piles up almost as many bodies as Liam Neeson did in "Taken."
But be warned.
The movie's ending, with its perverse reverse echoes of "Casablanca," ratchets up the quease factor.
Like Morel's last movie, "From Paris With Love" might make you feel "taken" if you mull over the plot too much.
"From Paris With Love"
Rating: ★ ★
@x BTO factbox text bold with rule:Starring: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Kasia Smutniak
Directed by: Pierre Morel
Other: A LionsGate release. Rated R for drug use. language, sexual situations, violence. 92 minutes